My Square for Patti's ECRR

Patti's theme was hands and I made several trails for her project. I had ideas like a hand of cards and a hand of bananas and square filled with various definitions of hands. Then I simplified my idea and started working on the subject of human hands. I played around with arrangements of hands and even considered just making patterns with duplicates of hands placed in various directions to fill a square. I drew a hand and filled it with the phrase, Made by hand, in about 9 languages and printed it out on my ink jet printer. I did another hand with definitions of hand. I had just been given Photoshop Elements for a gift and did all the lettering in that program. I had the worst time trying to space the vertical lettering on the fingers. I will share the secret to adjusting the spacing/kerning of vertical lettering in Photoshop Elements. This answer makes me chuckle every time I think of it. You have to select Asian text options and the once in that menu you need to select Tsume and you get a precentage slider to adjust the spacing. Once you have done that you can adjust the vertical spacing. Now I know that makes perfect sense when you think about writing Asian characters, but is that intuitive in English or other western languages?

Then I started thinking about all we can do with our hands and played with images of hands creating things. That lead to the idea that our creativity is in our own hands and finally that the happiness we feel is in our own hands. Simplifying that idea lead to the idea that our joy is in our own hands.

Now, I had spent so much time playing around with all those ideas, that I ran up to the deadline and ended up finishing up my final square the night before I needed to mail to the next player. I had beaded a hand with the word joy off the background fabric. I simply appliqued the beaded hand on the background fabric. I did tear up some of the silk fusion Patti sent and attached it with beading and dark blue silk flowers, but I didn't like it and took it out. Having more negative space seemed like a better choice than having poorly designed elements. The only thing that tied my square in with the other squares were the colors that I used. I tried to use some of the same colors that were peeking out from the edges of the already worked squares.

Now you might be thinking I had a difficult time, but you would be wrong. I really enjoyed exploring all the ideas and trying the various approaches to the idea of hands. I used anatomy books and drew hands daily for about three weeks. I referenced doll making books and tried making just the hands. I learned so much that I am sure I will go back and explore the subject of hands again.